Solidarity with TPS Strike, General Meeting 28 March 2012 and Important Information about the General Secretary’s Consultation Ballot

Please find below a notice on the TPS strike and how you can show solidarity, as well as the agenda for our General Meeting next week. The agenda includes information about Sally Hunt’s proposed changes to UCU.

1. TPS strike action – show solidarity

Please note that the 28th of March is a strike day for our colleagues who are on the Teacher’s Pension Scheme (TPS). Proposed changes to this pension scheme are likely to see greater contributions from members in exchange for reduced benefits.

Members are encouraged to show solidarity on the picket lines in the morning, before the General Meeting in the afternoon. Goldsmiths UCU members are asked to join the pickets at Lewisham College, Lewisham Way from 8am.

2. General Meeting Agenda, 28 March 2012

The General Meeting will take place at 1pm on Wednesday the 28th of March in the Ben Pimlott Building Lecture Theatre.

After her re-election as General Secretary, Sally Hunt has proposed several changes to the way UCU is run. The three main changes are to reduce the size of UCU’s National Executive Committee from 72 to a maximum, to allow members to be directly consulted on employer’s offers before the union decides whether to escalate action, and to have members elect the national negotiator posts currently elected by annual conferences.

There has been a great deal of opposition to these proposals, and members are strongly encouraged to read this document, which goes through the proposals one by one and highlights many issues: http://ucu.brighton.ac.uk/UCU_GS_Survery.pdf

A ballot was opened on the 12th of March and closes on the 28th at 12noon. Although the GM takes place after the close of the ballot, it is still important that we discuss the implications of these changes, in the light of the upcoming UCU national congress.

2. Motion on National Student Survey

This branch notes:

That the National Student Survey (NSS) is a key element of neoliberal proposals (such as those in the 2011 Universities White Paper) to transform higher education into a marketable commodity

That the NSS naturalises the idea of students as ‘customers’ and staff as ‘service providers’ and further embeds a culture of ‘measuring’ and ‘ranking’ inside HE

That institutions are increasingly using the NSS as a performance management tool with no obvious pedagogic benefits

That, as the former head of the Higher Education Academy put it in the THES, the NSS is a ‘pseudoscientific tool purporting to be reliable on the spurious psychologistic grounds that there is some statistical congruence between the responses on a small group of agree-disagree questions around a common topic’.

This branch agrees:

To oppose the NSS and to investigate the possibility of urging members not to comply with procedures related to the NSS

To work with other UCU branches in developing a campaign of opposition to the NSS

To work with student unions and student groups to call for a boycott of the NSS